{"product_id":"descent-isbn-9781400075010","title":"Descent","description":"In \u003ci\u003eDescent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss,\u003c\/i\u003e Brad Matsen brings to vivid life the famous deep-sea expeditions of Otis Barton and William Beebe. Beebe was a very well-connected and internationally acclaimed naturalist, with the power to generate media attention. Barton was an engineer and heir to a considerable fortune, who had long dreamed of making his mark on the world as an adventurer. Together, Beebe and Barton would achieve what no one had done before--direct observation of life in the blackness of the abyss. Here, against the back drop of the depression, is their riveting tale.“The sensational exploits of Beebe and Barton and the bathysphere kept Americans on the edges of their seats in the 1930s, and, as Brad Matsen proves in \u003ci\u003eDescent\u003c\/i\u003e, they can still deliver a thrill.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Captivating. . . . A worthy tribute to [Barton and Beebe’s] remarkable achievement.” —\u003ci\u003eNature\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“[Matsen is a] master storyteller. . . . You’ll be well rewarded in reading this work.” —\u003ci\u003eDecatur Daily\u003c\/i\u003eBradford Matsen has been writing about the sea and its inhabitants for twenty-five years in books, film scripts, essays, and magazine articles. Among his books are Planet Ocean: A Story of Life the Sea, and Dancing to the Fossil Record; Shocking Fish Tales; and Fishing Up North, and he is the author of the award-winning Incredible Ocean Adventure series for children. He was a creative producer for the Shape of Life, an eight-hour National Geographic\/Sea Studios television series on evolution that aired on PBS in April 2002, and wrote the accompanying book of the same name. Matsen has written on marine science and environmental topics for Mother Jones, Audubon, Natural History, and many other magazines. His coverage of depleted ocean resources in Mother Jones, \"Blues In the Key of Sea,\" won the Project Censored Award as one of the ten best stories of 1999. His essays have been included in Book of the Tongass as part of the influential Literature for a Land Ethic series, the Smithsonian Institution's Ocean Planet, and other anthologies. He lives in Seattle and New York.One\u003cbr\u003eBARTON\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Otis Barton told the story, he always said it began and very  nearly ended on Thanksgiving Day in 1926, when he went for a walk to  buy a newspaper. He left his third-floor apartment on East  Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan and turned toward Madison Avenue,  loping along lost in thought. Barton was preoccupied that morning with  a recurring fantasy in which he was a celebrated explorer just back  from\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ea dangerous adventure, with photographs and specimens of creatures  never before seen by man, resting between expeditions in a penthouse  apartment with a weeping willow on the terrace, a beautiful girl who  liked camping and looked good in a pith helmet by his side. Like other  boys enchanted by the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and  the other fantasists who were so popular during his childhood, Barton  had feasted on daydreams of wild animals, caves filled with gold, and  lost civilizations. As a young man of twenty-six, the theater of his  imagination was still as vivid to him as the pavement beneath his feet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the real world, though, Otis Barton was an engineering student at  Columbia University, the grandson of a merchant who had started with a  clapboard storefront in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1850, sold dry  goods, and prospered. Otis Barton’s father, Frederick, went to Harvard,  made a small fortune as a textile mill salesman during the boom years  just before the turn of the century, and moved his family to New York,  where business was even better. His first son, Frederick Otis Barton,  Jr., was born there on June 5, 1899, followed by two daughters, Ellen  and Mary, and a second son, Francis. Frederick Barton died suddenly in  1905—heart attacks ran in the family—and his wife, the former Mary  Lowell Coolidge, packed up her children and moved first to Concord,  Massachusetts, and then to a house on Marlborough Street in Boston.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMary Barton’s relatives and social circle included the Lowells, Cabots,  and Coolidges, who had built their fortunes in railroads,  manufacturing, and finance as coal, steam, and cheap labor drove the  engines of the Industrial Revolution. Her marriage to Frederick Barton  had been considered shrewd by family patriarchs, who correctly assumed  that merchants would capture a significant share of the money pouring  into the pockets of mill and factory workers as mass consumption became  a predictable part of the economic equation. After Mary returned to  Boston as a widow with her share of the Barton inheritance and her own  small fortune, she settled her family into the proven aristocratic  pattern of fall and winter in the city, spring traveling abroad, and  summers on Vineyard Sound.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOtis Barton had been raised by women. His mother, her sisters, and\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ea devoted nurse, Katy Gaule, tended him like a prince, and the only  indelible image of men in his life was a painting by William Merritt  Chase that hung in their parlor entitled A Portrait of Master Otis  Barton and His Grandfather. Against the kind of dark background  familiar to anyone who has wandered through a gallery of Dutch masters  stands the figure of four-year-old Otis in a high-collared,  thigh-length smock and knee socks, next to a seated, gray-bearded  patrician holding a sheaf of papers on his lap. Otis, looking directly  at the artist, is a beautiful child with an oval face, dark hair combed  to a shock in the middle of his forehead, and perfectly spaced features  that hint of intelligence. His grandfather’s countenance is tragic by  comparison, defined by sagging pouches under his eyes and an expression  of utter weariness. The painting seems to suggest sadly that all lives  pass from hope to defeat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt twelve, Otis Barton joined the tribe of privileged teenaged boys at  Groton, where he played baseball and became something of a legend  because of his academic record. Before he could read or write, he had  discovered that he could think in pictures and recall images in his  mind as though he were looking at a photograph or a painting. Otis used  this rare gift of an eidetic memory as a parlor trick, reciting long  passages in Greek and Latin after seeing them just once on a page. He  could do the same thing with figures and reading assignments. Rote  learning and memorization were in vogue, and he scored the  second-highest grades in the history of the school to that time. Otis  was a tall, good-looking young man who should have fit in well with his  classmates, but he often came across as moody and awkward, perhaps  because the terrain of his imagination was every bit as real to him as  that of the outside world. By the time he left Groton he was known as a  loner and a daydreamer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReal adventure broke through Otis Barton’s solitary fantasy life most  often during summers in Cotuit on Vineyard Sound, where his family had  a mansion they called a cottage, an enormous seaside pile of dozens of  small rooms and porches with lawns sloping to the sea. The house was  divided into a women’s wing and a men’s wing shared by Otis and Francis  with a steady stream of tutors and hired playmates. The Bartons devoted  their summers to picnics, swimming, boating, outings to neighboring  towns, ice cream socials, and costume parties. Sometimes Otis holed up  alone, reading or simply lying in his bedroom or on a cot on the porch,  getting up only for meals, but on other days he organized energetic  adventures. One summer, when he was reading In Darkest Africa, Henry M.  Stanley’s account of becoming the first European to cross the Dark  Continent, Otis became obsessed with the way the natives captured  animals in pit traps. He persuaded his brother to help him dig one  outside the toolshed, cover the pit with branches, seaweed, and sand,  and trap their gardener, George Childs. The story endured decades of  repetition at family gatherings.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe ocean, though, was the dominant presence of Otis’s summers in  Cotuit. In sailing dinghies, he and Francis would follow the gray-blue  forms of sand sharks over the shoals of Vineyard Sound and sometimes  spear them for sport. Once, Otis dove at one of the shadows from the  crosstrees of a large sailboat with a knife in his hands, but the shark  was too fast for him and got away unharmed. Otis burned with curiosity  about the realm of shark shadows and unseen treasures and demons  beneath the sea, and during his summers at Cotuit he recapitulated the  history of human attempts to descend into its mystery. After he saw a  drawing of a naval battle between the Greeks and the Syracusans in  which saboteurs swam invisibly underwater by breathing through hollow  reeds, he took a length of garden hose and, with Francis holding the  end of the hose in the air, weighed himself down with bags of BB shot,  held his nose, and walked along the sloping bottom from the beach,  taking sips of air from the hose. At a depth of about six feet, he  could no longer draw a breath through the tube, and he realized that  his lungs just weren’t powerful enough to pull the air that far from  the surface. Obviously, Otis thought, the only way to go deeper was to  bring air with him. He had seen an etching of Alexander the Great  sitting on the bottom of the sea under a barrel, so he tried a dive  with a washtub over his head, tied by its handles to his shoulders. He  could breathe, but the air made his washtub so buoyant he couldn’t sink  more than a few feet, even with weights.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring the summer of his sixteenth year, Barton’s passion for sailing,  shark hunting, and fishing was enriched after he found a diving  equipment catalog at a boatyard in Cotuit. The catalog advertised a  selection of professional gear available in 1915 that men used for  salvage work and for exploring to depths of sixty feet. A complete  outfit with helmet and suit was too expensive, but he ordered a small  brass pump that could send air down to a depth of thirty feet and a  length of nonkinking hose. The brass and copper helmets in the catalog  were sturdy-looking, with molded shoulder plates. The concept was  simple, so Barton sketched out a plain wooden box with a glass pane in  front and a hose coupling on top with straps on the sides that ran  under his armpits, and took his design to a cabinetmaker in Boston, who  built it for next to nothing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the helmet arrived on the freight wagon, he and Francis  immediately hauled it, the pump, and the hose to the Cotuit town wharf.  While a small crowd gathered, Barton attached bags of BB shot to his  belt, slid into the arm straps, and lifted the helmet onto his  shoulders. If he got into trouble, his plan was to release his weight  belt and let the air in his helmet bring him to the surface. With  Francis and another boy manning the pump and hose, Otis climbed down  the wharf ladder and settled to the mud of the harbor twenty feet down.  But a minute later he reappeared, shinnying back up a piling and  heaving himself up the ladder. Between the buoyancy of the helmet and  its armpit straps acting to lift him up and his weights holding him  down, he was being torn in two. So Barton hung the shot from the helmet  instead of his waist belt. This was more dangerous because he couldn’t  easily get rid of the weight in an emergency, but it was the only way  to stay comfortably submerged while wearing a light wooden helmet full  of air. If he couldn’t breathe, he would just take off the helmet and  hope for the best.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarton climbed back down the ladder and this time walked around on the  bottom of Cotuit Harbor for half an hour. The rhythmic panting of the  pump sounded loudly in his ears, and he was surrounded by a dim light  that he would later describe to Francis as “church-like.” The murky  water of the heavily used boat basin surrendered no great wonders, but  Barton thought the glimpses of debris, old moorings, eel pots, a few  shrimp, and the odd flatfish skipping away from his bare feet were  miraculous. Until the end of the season in August, Barton explored in  his helmet almost every day and often manned the pump while Francis and  the other children explored the world beneath the sea. And then it was  back to Boston.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn September, Barton stuck with family tradition and went to Harvard  College, where he worked his way through courses in engineering,  mathematics, and natural science with the same lackluster ambition but  spectacular results that had worked for him at Groton. After his  graduation in the spring of 1922, he took off on the trip around the  world that was almost obligatory among the young men of his social  class. Big game hunting was the rage, and he spent a few months  shooting lions, tigers, elephants, and antelope on the African savanna  and in the jungles of India. When he got tired of roughing it, he  meandered eastward along the chain of deluxe colonial hotels in exotic  locales and eventually fetched up on the Sulu Sea in the Philippines,  where native divers told him about battles with enormous octopi and  about giant clams with pearls as big as fists just beyond the reach of  a man holding his breath underwater. Barton spent hours in the shallows  of the tropical ocean, mesmerized by the gaudy reef fish and splashy  corals and tantalized by the deep water, where the color shifted from  aquamarine to deep blue to purple.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBack in New York with his wanderlust year under his belt, Barton  checked into graduate school at Columbia as his mother ordered, but his  imagination never left the ocean. He scoured the college library for  books on undersea exploration and discovered that people had been  ducking themselves underwater using buckets and air chambers for  thousands of years. The crush of water pressure and their need to  breathe, however, kept them within a few feet of the surface, as he had  discovered from his own experiments in Cotuit harbor. In 1690, Edmund  Halley, better known for his passion for comets, broke the air and  pressure barriers by inventing a weighted wooden trapezoidal box with a  glass top in which he could descend for a few minutes to about sixty  feet. He also invented an underwater pulley system for delivering air  to the diver in separate barrels, but the device still could not  transport a man beyond the sunlit shallows near shore. Powerful air  pumps, full diving suits that protected a helmeted diver down to about  three hundred feet, and new techniques to prevent the bends were just  being tested in the mid-twenties, and navy submarines—from which no  view outside was possible—had descended to 365 feet. But the abyss  remained as unknown and mysterious as outer space.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Otis Barton turned onto Madison Avenue on Thanksgiving morning in  1926, he glanced back down East Sixty-seventh Street to watch the sun  transform the top branches of the bare trees of Central Park into  golden lattices against the chrome-blue sky. New York was an  exhilarating feast of beauty, but above all it was paradise for a  dreamer. Another young man living there that fall, F. Scott Fitzgerald,  had declared that the city was leading America on the greatest,  gaudiest spree in history as the economic boom reached mythic  proportions. Battalions of men in suits scrambled to keep the money  machine moving toward their own dreams of permanent prosperity in a  market that never went down. Bank chairmen and shoeshine boys shared  stock tips, President Calvin Coolidge declared that the business of  America was business, and a well-known billionaire told a reporter from  Ladies’ Home Journal that everyone ought to be rich. Otis Barton parked  his own money with a conservative investment company and forgot about  it except for the checks that arrived every month with ever-increasing  amounts on them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe exhilaration of high times suffused every side of life in New York  City. More than 250 plays, musicals, and revues premiered in 1926,  including Florenz Ziegfeld’s new edition of his Follies called No  Foolin’, which opened at the Golden Age Theater on Broadway after  throngs stood in the street for days to buy tickets. Uptown in Harlem,  the silky howl of the Jazz Age poured from hundreds of clubs and out  into the city, blending with the tunes of the Gershwins and Irving  Berlin. And the miracle of radio had blossomed, so the music also flew  through the air and into parlors, kitchens, and bedrooms around  America. Two Sundays before Thanksgiving, David Sarnoff had thrown a  switch at 8:00 p.m. to broadcast an evening of entertainment over the  first radio network, which linked the studios of the National  Broadcasting Company with stations in twenty-one cities. The broadcast  included the music of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York  Philharmonic, and the comedy routine of a hit vaudeville act, Weber and  Fields. Millions of people on the Eastern Seaboard tuned in and  welcomed New York itself into their homes. Sarnoff’s radio network,  along with hundreds of magazines and seventeen daily newspapers, were  transforming New York as much as the frenzy on Wall Street.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300006023397,"sku":"NP9781400075010","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400075010.jpg?v=1767725006","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/descent-isbn-9781400075010","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}